Previous positions: Associate general counsel
for both the University and the U of C Hospitals; previously practiced corporate-securities
law at a Chicago firm.

Other degrees: MA’78, psychology,
University of Houston; JD’80, Northwestern University.

On the job: The University is a highly regulated
enterprise. Overseeing four other attorneys, I advise the president, deans,
and chairs on how to carry out their activities in a way that complies with
these laws. In research, for example, there are regulations for human subjects,
animals, biosafety, misconduct. Employment laws prohibit discrimination
and sexual harassment, and protect people with disabilities. We deal with
bond, real-estate, and zoning issues. In the area of intellectual property,
where faculty develop inventions or drugs and want to patent and market
them, we get involved in licensing the patents or the start-up companies.
I keep the president up-to-date on matters involving litigation and potential
legal risks.

Currently on the docket: We’re preparing
to compete to retain the contract to manage Argonne National Laboratory
for the Department of Energy, and the whole process has a legal context.
We have regular meetings with the management team, talk about the kinds
of initiatives to propose, whether we want a partner to help run the lab.
Preparing the proposal for a government contract is a massive undertaking.
The lab is integral to the work the University does in science now, so we’re
working very hard to be in a position to retain the contract.
There are a number of issues involving the medical center—some lawsuits,
many compliance issues. The University has maybe a dozen ongoing lawsuits
at a time. At least half of those are employment-related issues, people
who believe they were mistreated in some way or were unfairly let go. The
rest are hard to categorize—occasional claims brought by students,
occasional commercial claims.

Signs of a litigious society: Two or three
years ago a student brought a claim that he didn’t get a general education
as promised in the brochures. He lost, but it took a while.

Heeding Uncle Sam: There’s increasing
focus on not-for-profits these days, a fallout of Sarbanes-Oxley, looking
for similar accountability in not-for-profit institutions that we’ve
seen in the corporate world. That’s meant a greater focus on compliance
issues. So we’re seeing congressional hearings about whether there
should be increased scrutiny of not-for-profits—increased tax regulation,
for example. I advise the president and others about developments on those
issues.

How she got here: As an undergraduate I
studied human development. I was planning to go to graduate school, not
law school. I grew up in an academic family and always assumed I would end
up at a university. I started in graduate school studying developmental
psychology. At the time there were not many jobs for academics—not
that there ever are, but it was a particularly tough job market—and
I was teaching introductory psychology at a place where the students weren’t
anything like the students here. It made me rethink whether I really wanted
to be teaching. And that’s when I decided to go to law school. In
the end I wound up back at a university but doing something quite different.